WAVELAND, Miss. - The New Waveland Cafe seems like the kind of place one might find near Madison or Berkeley, or perhaps in the parking lot of a Phish concert.

Located inside a cavernous geodesic dome, the cafe offers three meals a day that are served by the Rainbow Family of Living Light, a scruffy assortment of dreadlocked, tattooed and pierced crew members, most of whom are in their 20s. Guitar and drum music wafts from nearby tents, and the Center for Alternative Living Medicine offers condoms and massages.

A few yards away, the scene at the Waveland Market is quite different. An open-air market (a misnomer since everything is free) that offers everything from laundry detergent and clothing to potato chips, it is manned by a neatly groomed staff of evangelical Christians in bright green t-shirts. They are considerably older, and as one might expect, more conservative than the cafe staff.

The New Waveland Cafe and Market is one of the most curious yet inspiring stories to emerge in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Located in a devastated town that took the brunt of the storm’s fury, the cafe and marketplace are the combined effort of two groups from radically different backgrounds who have come together to help the residents of the beleaguered Mississippi coastline.

In the process, the Rainbow Family and the church volunteers have found common ground - for one thing, they both like to dance - and mutual respect.

“It’s a marriage of cultures,” said Fay Jones, 56, who along with her husband Pete oversees the marketplace. “We have thoroughly enjoyed working with these Rainbow people. I think it’s expanded our hearts.”

Said Aaron Funk, a 33-year-old member of the Rainbow Family, “They have been our best friends and allies throughout this entire thing. ... There’s no reason that anyone’s personal opinion or politics entered into this. The needs are so huge that to try to wave your flag at these people would be extremely disrespectful.

“The main story here is cooperation,” he added. “It’s a beautiful thing.”

The two groups found each other amid Katrina’s devastation because of the determination of several volunteers, who hit the road after the storm looking to help, and a fluke meeting in a Louisiana church parking lot.

In the days after the eye of the Aug. 29 hurricane came ashore near New Orleans and evacuees flooded into Texas, emergency officials in Bastrop County near Austin, Texas, held a meeting to coordinate the fledgling relief efforts of local churches that were eager to help in the devastated communities along the Gulf Coast. A woman at the meeting said that her daughter had survived the storm in her attic in Waveland, Miss., that the town had been destroyed and that no one was there to help.

Afterwards, four men from evangelical churches in Bastrop headed to a Wal-Mart and filled a van, a pickup truck and a horse trailer with supplies, said the Rev. Max Bricka, associate pastor of Celebration Community Church, who was one of the four. They then headed to Waveland, arriving Sept. 2, four days after the storm struck.

They immediately set up a propane oven and a tent and started cooking, and before long, “there were people coming out of the woods covered in mud who hadn’t eaten in days,” Bricka said. “As soon as they heard we were from Texas, they just started crying. We were the first people that weren’t involved in the disaster that they had been involved with. They needed someone to hug them and love them.”

The crowds grew so large in the next two days, Bricka said, that they called Bastrop for reinforcements; after that, volunteers and food arrived on a daily basis. It was during one of those trips between Texas and Mississippi that the church volunteers ran into a Rainbow member in a church parking lot in Hammond, La., and invited them along.

The Rainbow Family members are self-described “hippies” who believe in decision-making by consensus and who participate in the annual Rainbow Gathering, held each Fourth of July in a different national park. The purpose of the gathering is to meditate for world peace, Funk said, but it’s also a chance to cook, share food and play music.

Clovis Siemon, 25, who has participated in the gatherings since he was a child and has cooked at them in recent years, headed south from Wisconsin with the blessing of his employer, Organic Valley, a dairy cooperative run by his father, George. Organic Valley provided a brightly colored bus, kitchen equipment and organic food. Rainbow members from around the country joined along the way.

Siemon said he and his colleagues called “a million and one” organizations, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Red Cross, offering to help, but he described these efforts as “like treading water.” By contrast, he said the church volunteers were thrilled for the help because the situation in Waveland was so dire.

The Rainbow volunteers started by cooking breakfast, and eventually took over all the cooking at the cafe, allowing the church volunteers to focus on the “windowless Wal-Mart” that offered free supplies to evacuees. The barbecuing is handled by a group of Rainbows who have named themselves the “Smoke Pit Pirates,” and the rest of the cooking is divided up among other Rainbow members.

The volunteers live in campers, tents, buses and the back of a semi-trailer. While members of the Rainbow Family generally stay up later than the church volunteers, Jones said that after she asked them once to stop playing music after 10 p.m., she’s never had to ask again.

“They’ve been very respectful of our requests,” she said.

The geodesic dome was donated by Burning Man, the annual festival of “radical self expression” held in the Nevada desert. Besides regular donations from Organic Valley, local companies, churches, relief organizations, the government and private citizens have donated food, money and other supplies.

At its peak, the market was serving 2,500 meals per day, though the number has now tapered off to about 1,000 meals a day as more and more residents find permanent housing.

“This place works so good that I quit Red Cross to work here,” said Shaun Clark, 43, who described himself as a “Pirate apprentice.”

Finishing lunch, Earl and Janet Ladner, who returned to Waveland more than 3 weeks ago after their new temporary home, a FEMA-provided trailer, arrived, had nothing but praise for the New Waveland Cafe.

“I think they’ve done a fine job,” said Earl Ladner, 75. “If people wouldn’t have come in here to help, I don’t know what we would have done.”

At the market nearby, Lisa Jones, 45, from Kiln, Miss., said the free food and supplies are critical for people returning to the area because even though some stores are reopening, many residents don’t have jobs or money to pay.

“Without this here, they have nothing to depend on,” said Jones, who has 11 people living in four FEMA trailers parked on her lawn. “It’s a blessing.”

Besides the relief supplies, the New Waveland Cafe and Market has tried to offer occasional entertainment as well, both for the volunteers and the victims of the hurricane. Funk, a dance instructor from California, has provided dance instruction at least once a week, and several of the church volunteers now know how to rumba.

There was a Halloween party that included costumes and plenty of treats for the local children, and the volunteers are planning an extravaganza for Thanksgiving. The cafe and marketplace is scheduled to close around that time, and the Rainbow Family and the church volunteers will go their separate ways.

Shawn Mikeska, 41, a church volunteer from Texas, said his nine days of working alongside hurricane victims and the Rainbow Family was life changing.

“I was always somebody who was caught up in the differences between people - they are right or they are wrong,” he said, adding that now, “I take a different view of what we can accomplish in the world if we just set those ideas aside.”

Said Funk, the Rainbow dance instructor, “The thing that we’ve all learned is that we all want the same thing but the rhetoric and words got in the way. So we took out the words and got to work.”

> “I was always somebody who was caught up in the differences between people - they are right or they are wrong,” he said, adding that now, “I take a different view of what we can accomplish in the world if we just set those ideas aside.”

(sigh) Instead of right and wrong, we have “rainbow” v. non-”rainbow.” Not sure that’s an improvement. It seems somebody out there must still realize what the gatherings were all about. (The “rainbows” don’t seem to get it.)

“I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.” Groucho Marx

> Said Funk, the Rainbow dance instructor, “The thing that we’ve all learned is that we all want the same thing but the rhetoric and words got in the way. So we took out the words and got to work.”

> “Get in the way”??? Sex, drugs, and Rock ‘n’ Roll are what it’s all about.

I’m so glad you said it, Connie. If you hadn’t, I would have.

I never did understand why sex is supposed to be “unspiritual.” Seems to me, nothing brings one closer to the divine, except maybe really good psychedelics.

I wonder why our “spiritual” friend asssumes that the folks doing service on the gulf coast have given it all up; or that to do “the work”, it is necessary to give it all up?

Many of the people I know doing “the work” started out drawn to the sex and drugs and rock n roll; then they discovered something else was going on cleverly disguised under all that “partying.” It is true that for many people, the sex and drugs and rock n roll fall away eventually, and only the work remains. But there is no reason why they cannot exist concurrently, and for a great many people, they do. For some, they are inextricably linked.

”GraayWolf The Unforgiven Troll Wannabe” <graa...@cableaz.com> wrote in message news:1132916951.340985.112620@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...

> Been a lurker for a while and I just had to print out this story and hang it up on my wall. I remember the drugs and Rock N Roll but I guess it been a while cause I don’t remember much about the SEX?

well when ya went to the gathering in the trees there was birds doing their thing, nothing happened on the ground to fucking cold! spiritrising

”GraayWolf The Unforgiven Troll Wannabe” <graa...@cableaz.com> wrote in message news:1132916951.340985.112620@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...

> Been a lurker for a while and I just had to print out this story and hang it up on my wall. I remember the drugs and Rock N Roll but I guess it been a while cause I don’t remember much about the SEX?

In October, The Enquirer followed a group of missionaries who traveled to help victims of Hurricane Katrina in Waveland, Miss. This is one in periodic checks on the progress.

Soon, they will head down Interstate 10, west to New Orleans. They are packing up their food and supplies, storing away their instruments and rolling up their tents. They say they’ve done all they can, leaving an impression on one coastal Mississippi town.

“This is what it’s all about, man,” said a man who calls himself Flower. “It’s all about helping people.”

For nearly two months, Flower and a group called the Rainbow Family teamed up with religious volunteers and others to help the small Mississippi town of Waveland, population 7,000.

But this weekend, they closed the Waveland shelter that has served breakfast, lunch and dinner to volunteers and residents since Hurricane Katrina swept through the area.

Now, they say, they will move on to New Orleans, where their help is needed more. They feel like it’s time, because they have seen the progress Waveland has made.

“We just want to make a difference,” said a Rainbow Family member who calls himself Clovis. “Wherever we can go to help, that’s where we’ll be.”

The progress is good news to the Northern Kentuckians who traveled to Waveland in October to help with the relief effort.

“It’s good that the area is starting to get back up and running as much as it can and start rebuilding,” said Todd Hannan, a 39-year-old automobile glass works designer from Florence, who helped organize the trip for a group of Northern Kentucky Methodist missionaries.

Still, the closing brought an end to the special relationship of volunteers who helped to revive the town.

‘A bunch of hippies’

Waveland Mayor Tommy Longo says that nearly 60 percent of all the city’s structures were destroyed, that hundreds were left homeless and that more than 50 people were killed in the area.

The town - 60 miles east of New Orleans - is a mix of wealthy retirees, stubborn lifers and young professionals who longed for a quiet place on the water. But none could have guessed who would bring help to them when it was most needed.

Its saviors appeared about a week after Katrina struck on Aug. 29. They were hippies.

The Rainbow Family, a loosely connected international group with the motto of “no religion, no politics,” came through the area on their way to Florida to meet other members of the group. Those in the Rainbow Family eat only organic food, sleep in tents and keep in contact via wireless Internet.

The few in that first group stopped when they saw the destruction in Waveland.

“They did what they always do - they set up shop and started cooking, started helping everyone out,” said Mike Sweeney, a 48-year-old businessman from Atlanta who came to volunteer and never left.

Sweeney now acts as a liaison among various volunteer groups and the county emergency management operation.

“I’m sure no one here thought a bunch of hippies would come help them out,” Sweeney said. “But they did, and what they’ve done is amazing.”

In that first week after the storm, the group set up shop in the parking lot of a Fred’s grocery store, just across the street from the city Police Department. They covered their belongings with tents and began to provide food, not only to residents of the town, but also for the emergency workers who traveled there to help. Many in the Rainbow Family described how they started cooking food and how the people of Waveland came out of the nearby woods, some without clothes, to eat.

By that time, others had arrived - more of the Rainbow family who were contacted via the Internet, and a group of Methodist missionaries who had heard of the destruction in Waveland.

Together, they helped the people of the town recover.

They called their shelter the New Waveland Café.

Longo said his town could have never survived if it weren’t for the many volunteers who helped, and he singled out those who created the Waveland Café.

“There are so many great people in this country,” Longo said. “And to have those come from far away to help us out, we are so thankful. The Waveland Café has done great things for us.”

Other missionaries began to arrive and help as well, including those from Northern Kentucky.

It has been a month since Hannan and his group of Northern Kentucky missionaries volunteered in Waveland, and much has improved, Sweeney said.

Retail stores like Wal-Mart and K-mart have reopened, as have pharmacies and restaurants.

Sweeney said if there are any immediate needs for food or other items, smaller community centers have been set up across the county. He said more and more people are moving back to their homes or into housing provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“I guess it may be a bad analogy, but the hurricane created a wound, and we put a big Band-Aid on it for as long as we could,” Sweeney said. “Now, we don’t have to supply quite as much. The wound is healing.”

The next ‘mercy run’

But for those who were there, and saw the damage and victims first-hand, the closing of the Waveland Café is a somber ending.

“The café’s closing marks a necessary step of progress, I suppose, but it still makes me sad,” said Barry Holland, a 39-year-old from Florence who works in the treasurer’s office at the University of Cincinnati. Holland traveled down to Waveland with the 13-member Northern Kentucky group, where they helped unload donated supplies as they arrived from places all across the country. And, like many, he said the trip was life-changing.

“My time of service down there changed my life, and I’m sure the same is true for my comrades, to varying extents,” he said. “Fred’s parking lot will become a sort of Woodstock for our group members, and those like us from across the U.S. I can foresee many people wanting to make at least one pilgrimage to Fred’s, to relive their experience, to see the progress in Waveland, and try to retell the story to their family and others.”

The volunteers will remember the people they helped the most - like the man and wife who held everything they owned in their car, which was also where they lived.

Or the woman and child that had to bury their other relatives because they were lost in the storm.

“While I am certainly more thankful this Thanksgiving than in past years, I will find it very difficult and unrewarding to shop for, or receive, more semi-meaningless Christmas presents, knowing what the folks in Waveland still face,” Holland said.

> Soon, they will head down Interstate 10, west to New Orleans. They are packing up their food and supplies, storing away their instruments and rolling up their tents. They say they’ve done all they can, leaving an impression on one coastal Mississippi town.

And a job well done. You know it was a great thing for Rainbow and the public when all the resident anti-Rainbow misanthrope bitchers are gnashing their teeth on here

From: rasta
Subject: what about waveland and welcome home cafe?
Date: December 23, 2005

Are they still workin? I know that waveland is unofficially closed.......

From: hippiestead
Subject: what about waveland and welcome home cafe?
Date: December 23, 2005

double checked in a couple of other forums; rumor says that the people wanted New Waveland to open back up but the county people said that the Cafe was no longer needed. guessing that Welcome Home Cafe is still running cuz we read somewhere that a couple of folks from there are going to spend X-mas with their families.

From: hippiestead
Subject: what about waveland and welcome home cafe?
Date: December 23, 2005

last we heard Second Helping had opened up in Waveland & Welcome Home Cafe was still feeding. There's a Yahoo group for updates & whatnot.

From: Hawker
Subject: what about waveland and welcome home cafe?
Date: December 23, 2005

On 12/23/2005 8:52 PM, The digits of rasta...@gmail.com's hands composed the following:

> Are they still workin? I know that waveland is unofficially closed.......

Both New Waveland Cafe and Welcomehome Cafe shut down. WelcomHome Cafe shut down because of local pressure but I think in the end they were tired anyway and ready to be done.

New Waveland Cafe decided way back when to shut down after ThanksGiving so all rumors of being asked to leave are false. Folks were tired and wanted to go home.

Some of the New Waveland Cafe folks (mostly from Burning Man - not Rainbow) set up a new Cafe in St. Barnards Parrish. They are having a rough time getting going for reasons I don't care to get into here but are slowly ramping up.

Some other folks (not sure exactly who) went back to Waveland because the town didn't really want the cafe to end. They are trying to get that going again, but it sounds like they may lack the experience and equipment to get much going there.

From: hippiestead
Subject: what about waveland and welcome home cafe?
Date: December 23, 2005

ever have one of those days where your posts flip themselves? posted the 9:02 one first & the 8:54 one second

weird........

From: hippiestead
Subject: what about waveland and welcome home cafe?
Date: December 23, 2005

Hawker wrote:

> Some other folks (not sure exactly who) went back to Waveland because the town didn't really want the cafe to end. They are trying to get that going again, but it sounds like they may lack the experience and equipment to get much going there.

those are the folks we spoke of (ie-'rumor says')-as of 12-20 the county had vetoed a reopening

Thanks for the update on Welcome Home Cafe; we haven't heard much from those folks lately.

From: Chu Bbakka
Subject: what about waveland and welcome home cafe?
Date: January 1, 2006

"hippiestead" <hippi...@gmail.com> wrote in message news:1135395224.076220.144370@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com...

> those are the folks we spoke of (ie-'rumor says')-as of 12-20 the county had vetoed a reopening

A Second Helping is up and running in Waveland with Feed The People trying to bring in a kitchen from Ohio. Look for my "NEED HELP" post